The Editor kindly allows me a little extra space to make a request to my lady readers. I am thinking of trying whether a selection of Shakespeare’s Plays can be produced, in which many of the beauties should be preserved, and yet the whole made so absolutely free from objectionable matter, whether in plot or language, that any English mother might, without scruple, put it into the hands of her daughters from the age of 10 or 12 up to 16 or 18. Younger girls would not be likely to understand or appreciate the greatest of poets: and older ones may safely be left to read Shakespeare in any edition, expurgated or not, they may prefer: but it seems a pity that so many children should be debarred from a great enjoyment for want of an edition suitable to them. Neither Bowdler’s, Chambers’, Brandram’s, nor Cundell’s ‘Boudoir’ Shakespeare, seems to me to meet the want: they are not sufficiently expurgated to suit children.
I hope to produce a cheap and handy volume, containing about 15 plays, and shall be much obliged to any lady who will send a list (founded on recollections of her own girlhood, or on observation of her daughters’ reading) of the plays she thinks suitable. When there are several ladies in one family, if each would draw up an independent list, each such list would have its own value as a separate piece of evidence. And a list arranged in order of merit would be even more useful: but this, I fear, would entail some trouble. Mistresses of girls’ schools could give, probably, more information than any private individual as to which plays are most liked by girls.
Lewis Carroll